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Friday, June 22, 2018

Don’t smooch with your pooch!

Are you a dog lover? Do you cuddle, sleep, kiss or let your pooch lick you? I like dogs, but growing up on farm my
definition of having a dog is opening the door to let him or her run out to do
their business, roam around the farm for a bit and then open the door to let
them back in when they barked. Living in
a city with a busy schedule and a fair bit of travel means I’ve chosen cats
over dogs. I can love them. I can feed them and I can leave them. Growing up on farm with dogs and a mom who
was a nurse also meant that our dogs (and my brother and I) were taught not to
lick. Dog kisses were not something that
occurred in our house. Truth be told,
Kahlua, the black lab we had for 16 years like to find carcasses of dead animals
to roll in and chomp on and of course liked to play in the barn with the
cows. You never knew what had been in
her mouth before coming to say “Hi” and if you got close enough to her mouth
you often found yourself gagging from what she had just gotten into…

But why the dog talk?Because I came across a study published in the journal of mBio that found
that some dogs in China are carrying a potpourri of influenza viruses
including swine, avian and canine
flu viruses.Since we like to have
“close” relationships with our canine babies, there is a potential that someday
these viruses may jump to humans.

The researchers swabbed 800 ill dogs between 2013 and 2015
and found that 15% of the dogs had the flu.Shockingly, after the viruses were sequenced they found that 16
different strains of the flu were being carried by these dogs and some of them
were in fact Swine
influenza strains that had been detected in people in Europe and Asia.While there is no indication (at least at this
point) that the flu can jump from your pooch to you, it doesn’t mean it’s out
of the question.In fact, our close
contact may have allowed for us to build immunity against dog flu, but that
is yet to be seen.

What does this mean to us?Well, as I’ve mentioned in several past Talk Clean To Me blogs, don’t
get your knickers in a knot over the particular strain of influenza.I’m not insinuating we need to down play
influenza and the risk of transmission by any means.What I am saying is let’s be smart about
influenza.This study shows dogs can
carry pig flu, swine flu or bird
flu.There are additional studies to
show that some of the earlier canine flu outbreaks may have originated from Equine
or horse flu.Influenza has been
identified in all sorts of animals and of course people.